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The purpose of this paper is to explore and elucidate adolescents’ reasoning about risks related to food and eating.

Boys and girls aged 15-16 years participated in a focus group interview with role-playing as a stimulus for discussion and reflection. In all, 31 participants took part, divided into five groups. In the role-playing, the participants portrayed agents who they perceived to give messages about food. In the focus group they discussed their experience of carrying out the role-play, and how they usually cope with conflicting messages, preferences and needs regarding food and eating.

The findings suggested that there were two main themes of risk profiling related to eating. One concerned bodily risk related to the food ingested and included concerns both about not reaching health and performance due to the unfavourable intake of calories, nutrients, additives, bacteria, viruses and parasites, and threats to immediate well-being following consumption. The second main category concerned the risk of being conspicuous, or “sticking out”, which incorporated food-based gender norms and norms related to table manners. In practice, the risk of not displaying an appropriate image of themselves through their food and eating choices was more prominent than risk perceptions related to impacts of food choices on well-being and performance. Difficulties in classifying foods as “good” or “bad” enhanced their uncertainty.

The results suggest that health-promotion activities for young people should focus not only on how to feed their bodies but also on how to avoid feeding their anxieties.

The authors used role-playing with subsequent focus group interviews in order to explore how adolescents negotiate conflicting food messages they encounter in their everyday lives. The purpose of this paper is to describe adolescents’ perceptions about different messages and their sources and to explore the trust they place in such sources.

In total, 31 adolescents aged 15-16 years participated in role-playing with subsequent focus group interviews. A qualitative content analysis was used to analyse the data.

The adolescents depicted an everyday life with multiple and different messages about food and eating. In addition, they stated that these messages were conveyed by a wide range of sources at different levels, for example, by parents, teachers, sports coaches and media. The messages from different sources were conflicting and covered many different perspectives on food and eating. When negotiating food choices in the role-playing and in the focus group discussing how to handle different and conflicting messages, trust became visible. The trustworthiness of messages and trust in their sources were associated with several important aspects in regard to whether or not the messages were based on knowledge about food and nutrition, care for the person receiving the messages, and/or commercial interest. In addition, the results indicate that the situation and the social relationship to the person providing the message were of importance for trustworthiness.

This study is novel as it uses role-playing as a research method and describes the trust adolescents place on food messages and their sources. To understand the factors that enhance such trust is important for the development and provision of education, information, and other health-promotion activities related to food in order to support and strengthen adolescents’ critical reflections on food messages from different sources.